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One Of The Largest Bitcoin Exchanges Failed Today And Internet Pioneer Marc Andreessen Had This To Say

Mt. Gox was once the largest Bitcoin exchange. It also used to be the most popular. However, this week it officially shut down. And that news has shined the spotlight on Bitcoin. Technologist and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said this about Mt. Gox and Bitcoin:

"So there’s been very little actual substantive news in the last couple weeks. So like, for example, the actual price of Bitcoin has not moved that much. What’s happened is one particular exchange, which is the now the sort-of infamous Mt. Gox exchange, is in some kind of crisis. And specifically, it seems to be in a liquidity crisis that is similar in some ways to the MF Global event from a few years ago, if you remember that, on the commodities market. And so Mt. Gox is in this crisis. And we’ll see what happens with the crisis: they may go bankrupt, they may get sold, they may shut down, they may, by the way, be just fine. We don’t know yet. But they’re just one of many places where Bitcoin is traded. They were at one the point the largest place Bitcoin was traded. Over the last 9-12 months, they have been displaced by a series of others that seem to be much better-run, that people seem to be doing much better on. People point to the price of Bitcoin falling, [but] what they’re really pointing to is the price of Bitcoin in the Mt. Gox exchange falling. But that is basically an artifact of people betting on Mt. Gox itself failing, as compared to Bitcoin itself being lower. If you look at the price of Bitcoin on the other exchanges, it’s been quite stable. And so we think this is an example of exactly what I was talking about, which is, in the early days of a technology like this you’ve got various people doing various things. Some of them are serious and credible, some of them aren’t. In the early days of the Internet, you had various fly-by-night ISPs, some of them went out of business. You had various fly-by-night e-commerce operators, some of them went out of business. … One way to look at it is basically Mt. Gox has to fail in order for Bitcoin to go mainstream because Mt. Gox was never set up to be able to take Bitcoin mainstream, which is basically what’s happening now. The good news is we have many new companies that are much more serious and much better run." - Marc Andreessen